Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There’s too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It’s the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry – a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language – and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
‘Sunshine Superman’ was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time – and this includes naps – I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
I always thought millennials are going westward, and they probably won’t understand vernacular poetry.
The mystical poetry of William Blake’s artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
Poetry is meant to be heard.
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
